Rumsfeld's new line on missing arms

By Grant McCool in New YorkMay 29 2003

US troops in Baghdad. Photo: AFP

Iraq may have destroyed its purported chemical and biological weapons before it was invaded in March, the United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has said in an effort to explain why none has been found.

The leaders of the US, Britain and Australia insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as justification for their invasion on March 20.

Mr Rumsfeld told the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank he did not know why Iraq had not used chemical weapons against the invaders as Washington had predicted it would.

The speed of the US advance might have caught Iraq by surprise, he said. "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict."

Mr Rumsfeld told his audience of foreign policy analysts, diplomats and business leaders on Tuesday that he suspected "we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people".");document.write("

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Mr Rumsfeld said Iraq was as large as California and search teams had been working there for only seven weeks.

Pentagon aides insisted that Mr Rumsfeld's response to a question after his speech about whether the US had exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq broke no new ground, and was consistent with past explanations.

But that Mr Rumsfeld even raised the possibility that Iraq might have destroyed unconventional weapons before the war prompted new questions about the intelligence President George Bush and his senior advisers relied on to go to war, and on the credibility of the US, defence analysts said.

"They don't have a good explanation, and therefore are trying to come up with as long a list as possible," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"But it's impossible to destroy or hide the quantities the Administration said they had without our noticing it."

Mr Bush, in a television interview last month, acknowledged, "there's going to be scepticism until people find out there was, in fact, a weapons of mass destruction program".

Mr Rumsfeld said US intelligence agents had confirmed that two trailers found in northern Iraq were mobile biological weapons laboratories. No biological weapons were found on either trailer, US officials say.